Fire burns Ice(landic) Collection

Copenhagen Fire of 1728; Árni Magnússon saves manuscripts.

Rendering of the terrible event in the city of Copenhagen, the home city of the Danish King, that burnt down on 20th October 1728.” 

ALERT!!!! New book on this topic.

How Iceland Changed the World: The Big History of a Small Island by Egill Bjarnason. just published May 11, 2021. Penguin (ALERT!!! added 5/16/2021.)

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The 1728 Fire of Copenhagen was devastating to the city’s libraries. Many volumes were lost at the University of Copenhagen and the observatory with records made by Tycho Brahe¹ were destroyed.

Árni Magnússon (1663-1730) Icelandic scholar and collector of manuscripts.

The library of Icelandic scholar Árni Magnússon (1663-1730) was destroyed, but he saved many manuscripts.² He spent much of his life building up what is by common consent the single most important collection of early Scandinavian manuscripts in existence, nearly 3000 items, the earliest dating from the 12th century. Foremost among the texts preserved in the collection are the many examples of the uniquely Icelandic narrative genre known as the saga, widely recognised as constituting one of the highpoints of world literature and still translated and read throughout the world today.³

The Arnamagnaean Commission (Den Arnamagnæanske Kommission) was set up in 1772 as a governing body for the Arnamagnaean Foundation, the collection of manuscripts and printed books that Árni Magnússon bequeathed, along with his private estate, to the University of Copenhagen on his death in 1730.

1. Christianson, John R. (1998). "Tycho Brahe in Scandinavian scholarship". History of Science. 36 (4): 467–484.

2. Árni Magnússon, un collectionneur de manuscrits médiévaux du début de l’époque moderne. Tabularia, 2015.

3. Arnamagnæan Manuscript Collection. UNESCO.Memory of the World.Inscribed 2009.